per # [CONTINUES] ACTION: danbri to write up orkut/i18n/"looking for"
issue ...
Here's a quick writeup. I will try find my old email files with more
detail on this:
Short version: be careful in Social Network site UI if you use ambiguous
phrases like "Looking For" that in practice have a dating/sex reading,
but the UI doesn't make that clear. The subtlety may be lost on users
unless the UI is carefully translated to their preferred languages. And
it may have serious real-world consequences if they mis-represent
themselves as having characteristics that are controversial in their
country.
Some years ago (2004-5), Google's Orkut social network became very
popular in Iran. It has since been heavily blocked at the ISP there, but
for a while was widely used. At the time (and afaik until today) there
wasn't a Farsi/Persian UI available for Iranian Orkut users, so they had
to manage as best they could with other languages. I don't know what the
options were, or how multilingual the interface was back then, but
English was the default. So, 1000s of Iranians were filling out user
profiles on Orkut, where the meaning of each field wasn't always clear.
Browsing around, I noticed a very large proportion of Iranian users had
filled out their profile indicating they were lesbian/gay or bi-sexual.
Noticably more than users from other countries. A Google staffer ran
some stats and confirmed that this was indeed the case.
My reading of this situation was that many users were mistaken and had
mis-represented themselves. My Google contact - after some consultation
- suggested instead that the site had somehow become a hub of
lesbian/gay community, and that the profiles were accurate.
I wish I had the old mails handy, to be clearer about this specific
case. I think the UI had a profile field that (implicitly) related to
dating, something like:
"Looking For: [ men / men and women / women / ... ]"
... though I forget the exact options, the ordering and the default.
My reading was that many of Orkut's Iranian users had missed the dating
aspect of this field. Hard to prove either way, but I still think it's
worth writing this up. I think there's a best practice to be articulated
here. Declaring yourself (accidentally) to be looking to date "men and
women" can be seriously embarrassing (or worse, illegal) in some
countries. And this is of course irregardless of whether there's
anything wrong with being gay/bi/whatever (which there isn't).
hope this is useful,
cheers,
Dan